Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Those happy Golden Years . . . .

Lord, do I miss being a student. And not just because I loved "Ramen-and-cheez-doodle surprise" night in the drafty old Victorian house I shared with seven roommates, not to mention waiting in line for seven hours at Student Health to get my asthma meds. I mean, it sounds terrible, but we had a sort of proletarian solidarity in those days that you young whippersnappers will never know. Why, many's the time when I led the other students in singing the Internationale before we . . . but I digress. The point is, I don't just miss being a student because it was such a delightful combination of adult freedom without adult responsibility. No, I miss being a student because I was just so damn smart.

I mean, a lot of you may think that I'm smart now. But when I was in school, I was a supergenius. Any old idiot can get to be a genius merely by dint of having a 150 IQ, but my intellect was of finer stuff altogether, faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful then the people who get to decide whether or not you make it onto American Idol. Even better, I knew everything*. My intellectual superiority to the rubes who did not attend my august institution--and many of those who did--was a tangible, glorious thing, which animated my days and warmed those dark nights when the boiler broke and I had to sleep in my entire wardrobe.

Best of all, I thought that I had invented snotty. Waxing sarcastic about the opinions of others was just so wickedly fun, especially when those other people were right there where I could watch the backs of their necks turn red. It honed my verbal skills to a sharp edge. It impressed the hell out of my fellow students, proving to everyone that I was exactly the supergenius I thought I was. The fact that other, older people, were not snotty confirmed my opinion that I must be some sort of genetic breakthrough, far outstripping the mental powers of my doddering elders.

Those days have passed, for me. But others are clearly still enjoying them¹. I wanted to comment directly on the post, but I can't, since there are no comments. Then I thought about writing Mr Northup an email gently pointing out the error of his ways. But that's so, you know, square. So I thought, "Hey, one good turn deserves another!" And don't I deserve, really, to be a little snotty? I've kept it in check for so long.

Besdies, while Mr Northup, like almost every PhD candidate I know, seems to think that he has discovered this literary art form, he is sadly mistaken. Friends, I not only perfected the medium; I hold the patent.

Mr Northup thinks I am an idiot. And not some garden-variety idiot; a "hard-nosed quasi-libertarian" idiot:

If I were going to write a parody of hard-nosed quasilibertarian policy analysis--an attempt to gently mock the tendency of some of my fellow travelers to only make the tough calls when it's someone else's ox being gored, and play into the stereotype of a libertarian as a person whose policies correspond astonishly well with his or her privileged status--and I decided to write about abortion, it might go something like this:

I'd sadly note the impossibility of a free lunch and the power of incentives to affect behavior in even the most private of realms. I'd talk about how naive it is to expect problems to be solved by well-meaning programs of governmental education--in this day and age, does anyone really not know that sex can result in pregnancy? That contraception makes it less likely? I'd shake my virtual head mournfully at the fantasies of my benighted friends on the left, pro-choice like me, but lacking the wisdom imparted by UChicago price theory.

No, the simple truth is that women--not me or my friends, you know, but other women--have unprotected sex and then have abortions because, well, it's not very costly; that's what Roe v. Wade means! "Safe, legal, and rare"--only in Shangri-La, I'm afraid; you only get to pick two. I'd write that, much as I hated to admit it (pro-choice as I am, you know), the deep, dark secret of all clear-eyed pro-choicers is that keeping abortion legal is, in fact, *the* secret cause of (other!) women's risky sexual behavior. Pro-choicers might talk a good game about safe sex, I'd sigh, but until we're willing to break out the coathangers, it's clear where our priorities really lie.

Now, to make this parody just right, I'd have to ignore what, on the face of it, would be the most obvious response to risky sex being too "cheap" relative to safe sex: target the "price" of safe sex *directly*, instead of getting at it only through the indirect (and, to the lustful mind, far less salient) route of penalizing those who actually end up pregnant. You know, the sort of line of thinking that might take into account the non-trivial costs of reliable birth control, especially for the uninsured (better not bring up how the state makes you see a doctor!). And I'd sure as hell better sweep under the rug all the unpleasant little truths about sexist social norms, about who pays for the pill, about the very real stigma that in many communities clings to any young woman who dares imply by what she purchases from her pharmacist or what she demands of her doctor that she is, in fact, sexually active.

After all, if I brought any of that stuff up, my readers might start wondering why the cross-national variance in teenage pregnancy and abortion rates is considerably greater than the variance in teenage sexual activity; they might think these considerations suggestive of a deeply undesirable set of policies and social norms that punish only optional public markers of sexual activity, like contraceptive use, while doing little to deter the private aspects, like actual sex. They might start thinking that this is one of those social ills that *does* hold out the prospect of unambiguous improvement; perhaps we needn't break out the coathangers, after all, if we want teenage pregnancy and abortion rates as low as those in Sweden!

Of course, the kind of change that would be required wouldn't be easy; it would involve shifts in both norms and policy, and a lot of down-and-dirty activism. It would mean confronting deeply embedded belief systems, ideologies that are quite hostile to female sexual autonomy. It would mean recognizing that the state is not the only cause of oppression in society, particularly for certain groups.

I know, I know--it's not polite to excerpt the entire thing. But I think it's safe to say that Mr Northrup's post has already brought us outside the dainty bounds of etiquette.

Interestingly enough, I was preparing a post on cross-national variation in pregnancy and abortion rates! Using that very chart! Unfortunately, unlike Mr Northrup, I have a job². However, I am hard-pressed to see how he draws his conclusions from the AGI's excellent data. For one thing, it seems to indicate that there is some sort of terrible "deeply undesirable set of policies and social norms that punish only optional public markers of sexual activity, like contraceptive use, while doing little to deter the private aspects, like actual sex" in the liberal Northeast, where women who get pregnant choose to abort, while the tolerant, loving Bible Belt is clearly comfortable enough with a woman's sexuality that should she get pregnant, she feels free to carry the baby to term.

Had he spent a little more time with the data, he might have noticed something curious: how many teens get pregnant does not seem to be very well correlated with the kind of sex ed they receive, at least if we assume that having voted for Al Gore is a pretty good proxy for a state's general attitude towards sex ed, and toss in Nevada on the (possibly erroneous) assumption that a state that has legalized prostitution probably doesn't have hard-nosed "abstinence only" education. Indeed, the very worst rates of teen pregnancy (and abortion) are in the District of Columbia, which I am assured by acquaintances who have taught there, has the very liberalist sex ed there is, and extremely good access to all sorts of family planning clinics.

Rather, a brief scan of the data reveals that abortion seems to be correlated with three things: being in the Deep South, having a large population of hispanic immigrants, and being highly urbanized. I assume that item number one is highly correlated with having abstinence-only education, but if that's so, why aren't Kansas, Missouri, and so forth similarly afflicted? And why do California, DC, and so forth dwarf Mississippi and Alabama in rates of pregnancy?

Furthermore, assuming that the number of abortions is at least a rough proxy for whether or not the pregnancies are wanted, it seems likely that we are picking up some noise from early teen marriages/cohabitation in the South and among hispanics. Over 50% of the pregnancies in the District of Columbia are aborted, while less than 20% of the pregnancies in Alabama are. I presume that some large part of that is due to differences in personal beliefs among the two populations, but the magnitude of the disparity--almost three times as many pregnancies carried to term in the deep south--suggests to me that more of the pregnancies in Alabama are probably intended, or at least welcome.

Regardless, the data simply doesn't support his core argument: that the problem is social norms and government policies are responsible for low rates of contraceptive use, leading to teen pregnancies. Indeed, the high rate of teen-pregnancy/abortion in states like New York, Maryland, and DC is driven in great part by the urban African-American population, where an illegitimacy rate above 80% makes the statement that extramarital sex is stigmatized ludicrous.

It is mildly fascinating to find myself--who has been an uninsured woman of extremely limited means forced to rely on Planned Parenthood for her women's health needs--the target of such a very pompous lecture on the subject by a white male graduate student who most assuredly has not "been there", or indeed in the neighbourhood of "there". Despite the impressively forceful self-confidence with which Mr Northup advances his view, I am afraid I will have to disagree, for which I have only the dull excuse that when I was actually in that situation, it was nothing like what Mr Northrup describes. It is not expensive to acquire birth control when you are poor; Planned Parenthood provides both doctors visits and birth control pills on a sliding scale, making the cost trivial to even the poorest of women. Even if they didn't provide it, a prescription for Trinessa (the generic form of Ortho-Tri-Cyclen Lo) is about $25 a month--or less than five hours of work at minimum wage; an annual exam is a couple days of extra work. That is not insignificant, but it's not impossible, either, especially for teenagers who have enough time on their hands to be having sex. Moreover, even in counties without Planned Parenthood, there are free healthcare clinics. And where there are not free healthcare clinics, there are condoms, and if memory serves, the girls don't usually pay for those. At $8 for a box of twelve, they are for most teenagers even more affordable on a per-act basis than the Pill, and while they certainly aren't perfect, I'd imagine they could put a hefty dent in those over 50% of aborted pregnancies that resulted from not using anything at all.

I'm not satisfied with this response, because it's so disorganized and muddy. But then it occurs to me that the reason that this is so is that the source shows exactly those characteristics--disappointing both from Crescat Setentia, and a graduate student at NYU. He never really attempts to refute my core thesis, which is that for teenagers, sex ed has high threshold effects: once you are aware that sex causes pregnancy, and birth control prevents it, there's not that much that sex ed can add. A perusal of the data on sex-ed programs would seem to back me up; effects are extremely modest. Abstinence-based education pretty clearly doesn't work, but contraceptive-based education, surprisingly, doesn't do much better.

Education works by countering ignorance. That's why initial anti-smoking education worked well. But after people knew that smoking caused cancer, telling them so again didn't much deter them. Likewise, once people know how to get pregnant, and how to prevent it, telling them so more elaborately doesn't get you much bang for your buck.

Now, there might be another threshold--there might be some form of sexual education so fabulous that it pushes us across the line. But I doubt it. For one thing, most sex ed is pretty useless--my head is still crammed with useless information about the relative effectiveness of vasectomies, IUDs and tubal ligations that I will certainly not need until I've had a few children, and can get from a doctor if I want it then. And for another, public health education campaigns have a pretty dismal success rate. Obesity, smoking, and drugs are only a few of the things that we have tried, and failed, to eradicate by telling people not to do them.

But why bother to deal with the data, when heavy sarcasm is so much more expedient, and is just as impressive to your audience--as long as they don't know anything either. Besides, that result doesn't feel right. A public education campaign about contraception should be overwhelmingly more effective than one about not smoking--after all, you're telling people who don't want to get pregnant, something cheap and easy they can do to not get pregnant! Yet, it doesn't work all that well. I find that outcome as surprising as Mr Northrup.

I don't pretend to know why we have so many unwanted pregnancies in this country, though these folks have some ideas. But at the heart of it, it seems to me to be a fairly typical case of people making a bad decision now to ignore the potential bad consequences later. That's very common behaviour--it's why I didn't floss yesterday--and it's very, very hard to eradicate with education.

Why is our pregnancy rate lower than Sweden's? Mr Northup would like to know, and so would many of my would-be interlocutors, and so would I. I'd also like to know why their rape rate is so high compared to the rest of Europe's, and Austria's rape rate is so low compared to ours. But I'm pretty sure that it's not because people in Sweden don't know that rape is bad, or how it can be prevented³.

*In a job interview a while back, I was being quizzed by an economics professor about how I had liked graduate school, and the intervening period. "When I graduated from grad school," I said ruefully, "I thought I knew everything important there was to know. Four years later, I've been humbled."

"Everyone thinks they know everything when they get out of grad school," he said solemnly. "Count yourself lucky that you got over it--a lot of my colleagues never do."

¹You made fun of him for being a young whelp! I hear you cry. Don't you know that that's just going to make him madder?

Indeed, I do. I remember very well the towering, not to say incoherent, rage to which I could be reduced in my student years by the mere suggestion that someone, particularly someone who was not one of my professors, or a radical guerilla living in exile, knew more than I did simply because they are older. But frankly, he earned it. And besides, one of the rare pleasures of getting older is the joy of pointing out to someone that they are not only being a jerk, but exactly the same, stunningly unoriginal kind of jerk, that you used to be before you knew better.

²Cheap shot! you cry. Is there some other kind in snotty-land?

³But what if sex ed is different? you ask. Undoubtedly it is. Maybe Sweden has found some unbelievably fabulous sex ed programme that we should import by the tonne. Sell it in Ikea!

But cross-country comparisons, as Mr Northrup should know, are fraught. They can be sabotaged by differences in reporting--does Sweden count an RU-486 abortion as an abortion, or something else? More importantly, with something that is as multi-factorial as abortion is, effects like having a relatively young, or relatively old population, poverty rates, cultural attitudes about childbirth and sex, and so forth often--even usually--swamp the things we are trying to measure, like effective sex education. It is interesting that Sweden has a low abortion, but if the reason their abortion rate is low is that that Sweden is full of Swedes, instead of the ethno-religious mutts that inhabit our fair nation, then that doesn't give us many useful policy options--other than moving to Sweden.

Posted by Jane Galt at January 24, 2006 06:31 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links